For it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill His good purpose. Philippians 2:13.
If your family is like ours, you just celebrated Thanksgiving by negotiating your way through a myriad of customs that have been meticulously built over the years because of beliefs, needs and/or taste or some combination of all three. I love cranberries at the big Thanksgiving feast. Not a single other person in my family likes them as I do…traditionally as a child we had a serving of tart, gloppy, cooked cranberries with our turkey dinner. Now, I also have them with the after Thanksgiving leftover meals. I could also have them all the next week because no one, not even my wife who prepares them in their gloriously tart and gloppy way, wants to taste them at all. Similarly, I never really liked stuffing (dressing to some families), and while everyone else had it with the meal, it wasn’t really for me—until a couple of years ago.
Another custom among the many, many of the Thanksgiving weekend, is the decorating of the house for Christmas. Although you can now pretty much start shopping at the big box stores for the latest in seasonal decorations in September (that’s the earliest I saw them at a certain depository of home improvement needs store this year), in our family, we cannot begin to put up any Christmas adornments until after Thanksgiving (unless it’s going to be so cold out after that Thursday that the weekend before makes more sense to put up the lights outside—but definitely NO lighting of lights until after the Thanksgiving dinner has been consumed!).
One last custom to share shows how we pass familial mores on from generation to generation—usually in an unintended manner. Since about 1995, when the Muppet Christmas Carol came out in video (we’ve amended our custom now to the DVD of course), we have watched this or another version of the Dickens’ classic (the Muppets win most of the time). After a hard day of decorating, usually as we sit down to another round of turkey, dressing and for some, cranberries (OK, only for me); we sing along with and say the lines with Kermit, Miss Piggy, the gang, and of course Gonzo Dickens. This year our middle son who is in grad school got home from work on Black Friday shortly after Ebeneezer Scrooge had retired to his cold, dark home and was visited by the Marley brothers with their admonition for him to change. Our son was a bit taken aback that we had started this very important tradition without him. At Thanksgiving time, we are very, very comfortable with the way we have always done things. His working at the mall kept him from getting home in time enough for him to see the traditional Dickensian reminder to Scrooge for him to stop making chains and to change!
In the early 2000’s, at least in the LHS circles and conferences that I was a part of on the west coast and nationally, we began to hear about the “paradigm change” that was sweeping the educational landscape. It really wasn’t about one particular area that needed to be reviewed—such as why keep eating cranberries when no one else likes them, or when is the best time to decorate or even, are there not other actors besides Michael Caine to be viewed as the epitome of every Scrooge there ever was (Albert Finney?)? The transformational construct of educational paradigm change said to me that in Lutheran schools we need to review all of our programs with the exception of the purity of the Gospel message in light of the shift that is happening in the educational world of this new century. This will stress our sensibilities about how we have gone about the teaching/leading business in Lutheran schools.
I believe that change should only happen when we evaluate with an eye toward excellence. It is my hope and prayer that we continue to see that some of the ways that we minister in Lutheran schools have served us very well over the years. As a matter of fact, certain aspects of how we teach students as individuals who are reflected through the glorious light of an Easter dawn, must always be a part of who we are—or we risk becoming a private school! However, if we insist on the tired old axioms of “that’s how we’ve always done it” methods, or “we’ve never needed that before” mentalities, we will not serve our families (or ourselves) as they deserve--or as our Lord would expect.
Paradigm change means that all aspects of our ministries must be assessed. Not to criticize or blame or put burdens upon those who have done so much for us over the years. No, it means to look to our Lord and Savior as the most revolutionary change agent of all time, who simply wants us to continue to seek, to improve, to progress, to change, to not be held hostage to how we’ve become comfortable in getting our job done. St. Paul
How about some apple pie with that paradigm change? I never really liked pumpkin!
